You Can't Enjoy What You Can't Do

It's half term. Across the country, parents are being encouraged to read with their children. The National Year of Reading is in full swing, the "Go All In" campaign is everywhere, and the message is clear: reading for pleasure matters.

And it does. It REALLY does. I support it completely. The statistics that prompted it are alarming: only 1 in 3 children aged 8 to 18 say they enjoy reading in their free time. That's the lowest level in twenty years. Among 5 to 8 year olds, daily reading rates dropped again this year. The National Literacy Trust's 2025 survey of nearly 115,000 children makes for sobering reading.

So yes, we need a national conversation about reading for pleasure.

But I want to talk about what's happening in some homes this half term. Not every home. But more than we'd like to admit.

A parent sits down with their child. They've chosen a book together. The child opens it and begins to read.

Every. Word. Is. Separate.

No expression. No flow. No natural phrasing. The child is decoding (accurately, in many cases) but so slowly that by the end of each sentence, they've forgotten how it started. The parent listens, encourages, tries to be patient. The child gets frustrated. The parent gets worried and takes over. Or they get frustrated too. Eventually, the book goes back on the shelf.

That's not a child who doesn't want to read. That's a child who can't yet read fluently enough to enjoy it.

Go All In Gets It Partly Right

To its credit, Go All In gets this partly right. The campaign isn't just about books — it's about audiobooks, podcasts, song lyrics, reading in all its forms. That breadth matters. But at some point, for most children, reading means reading text on a page. And if that experience is painful, no amount of broadening the definition will fix it.

You can't enjoy what you can't do. Not really. Not in the way that makes a child pick up a book voluntarily, lose themselves in a story, ask for "just one more chapter."

What the Research Says

The research is unambiguous on this. A 2024 study in the New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies put it plainly: if a child does not read fluently, the effort they put into reading is greater than the pleasure they get from it. So they avoid it. And the less they read, the less fluent they become. It's a vicious cycle that no amount of encouragement to "Go All In" will break on its own.

The NLT's own data confirms the connection: children who enjoy reading are twice as likely to have above-average reading skills. But here's the question nobody's asking loudly enough — which comes first? A 2022 twin study by van Bergen and colleagues found that literacy skills appear to fuel enjoyment, rather than the other way around. Children don't enjoy reading and then get better at it. They get better at it and then start to enjoy it.

Fluency Is the Gateway

Fluency is the gateway. Not a nice-to-have. The gateway.

Professor Tim Rasinski calls fluency "the bridge between decoding and comprehension." If you're unsure what reading fluency actually means, it's more than just reading quickly – it's reading with accuracy, pace and expression. Without automaticity – the ability to read words effortlessly – children's working memory is consumed by the mechanical act of reading. There's nothing left for meaning. That's why accurate decoders still struggle with comprehension. And without meaning, there's no pleasure.

So when we talk about the National Year of Reading, when we encourage parents to read with their children this half term, we need to be honest: for some children, that experience isn't joyful. It's hard. It's slow. It's demoralising. And telling those families to just read more isn't enough.

This is especially true for reading fluency in KS1. If children leave Key Stage 1 without sufficient automaticity, the gap between their decoding ability and their reading fluency widens through KS2. By Year 4 or 5, they're the children who avoid reading altogether.

What those children need is fluency. Systematic, explicit fluency instruction. Daily practice. Repeated reading. Prosody modelling. The things that build automaticity so that reading stops being an endurance test and starts being something a child might actually want to do.

The Missing Step

I'm not knocking the National Year of Reading. I think it matters enormously and I genuinely welcome the fact that it embraces audiobooks, podcasts and all the ways children can engage with stories and ideas. But a campaign about enjoyment without a strategy for fluency is like telling someone to enjoy a bike ride when they haven't learned to balance yet. The intention is right. The destination is right. But for some children, we've skipped a step.

This half term, if you're a parent reading with a child who struggles, know this: it's not about motivation. It's not about finding the right book. It's about fluency. And there are things that can be done about it.

If you're a teacher coming back after the break, ask yourself: do we know which children in KS1 can decode but can't yet read fluently? Because those are the children who will never "Go All In" on reading until we give them the foundation to do so.

Reading for pleasure is the destination. Fluency is the road that gets you there.

Start with our free 2-Minute Fluency Spot Check — a one-page guide to identifying fluency difficulties in your classroom. For a deeper look at how to assess fluency quickly in your classroom, read our practical guide.

Want to track fluency progress across your school?

See how we measure fluency and identify intervention priorities at Fetcham Village Infant School.

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Research Referenced

National Literacy Trust Annual Literacy Survey 2025 — Clark, C., Picton, I. & Cole, A. (2025). Children and young people's reading in 2025. National Literacy Trust. Based on 114,970 responses from children aged 5–18.
Van Bergen et al. (2022) — "Literacy skills seem to fuel literacy enjoyment, rather than vice versa." Twin study of 3,690 children. Published in PMC.
New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies (2024) — Reading for Pleasure: A Review of Current Research. Springer. Notes the correlation between fluency skill and reading enjoyment.
Rasinski, T.V. (2010) — The Fluent Reader (2nd ed.). Scholastic. "The bridge between decoding and comprehension."
NLT 2024 data — Children who enjoy reading were twice as likely to have above-average reading skills (34.2% vs 15.7%).

Got questions about fluency or the National Year of Reading?

Drop me an email: simon@readingfluency.co.uk

Or connect on LinkedIn: Simon Sharp

You Can't Enjoy What You Can't Do